It really is a battle we should never have to fight.

Nobody should ever have to write to a federal government agency to plead with the bureaucrats to stop the poisoning of children. Nobody should ever have to urge the local government to ask that agency to stop the poisoning today instead of decades from now.

Well, that is exactly what the Butte Watchdogs for Social & Environmental Justice and some citizens have been doing the last few months since the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was lowering the acceptable lead level in Butte, but with a major caveat.

They are giving Butte-Silver Bow and British Petroleum 25 to 40 years to get affected areas down to the new standard.

That would mean that the lead poisoning that has inflicted the children of Butte for so long will be allowed to continue for generations to come.

Lead poisoning, by the way, is really, really bad. A lot of us have been affected by it, even if we might not realize it. It is particularly harmful to infants and children.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lead poisoning can cause damage to the brain and nervous system, slowed growth and development, learning and behavior problems and hearing and speech problems.

It can cause a lower IQ, decrease ability to pay attention and under performance in school. And the health impacts shown by the Annual Health Needs Assessment conducted by St. James Hospital are an indicator of hazards to adults that may be tied to lead.

So, any person exposed to lead will likely be placed behind the 8 ball for life.

I am willing to bet that every person in Butte or the surrounding area who reads through that list of problems knows at least a few people who suffer from them.

The sad thing is that so many of them could have been prevented, but the EPA decided that the acceptable lead level in Butte was fine at 1,200 parts per million for so many years. The standard for the rest of the country, however, was much lower. Just 26 miles away in Anaconda, the lead standard was set at 400 parts per million.

Somehow, the EPA decided lead wasn’t as damaging in Butte, with ongoing claims that smelting didn’t impact the Mining City. Or maybe the agency just decided that it didn’t care about the people of Butte.

Either way, it is unbelievably unacceptable.

For many years, it has been nearly impossible to differentiate between British Petroleum, the EPA and Butte-Silver Bow. If you didn’t know the players while attending a rare public meeting about Superfund cleanup, it would be impossible to know who was with whom as they pushed the sub-par cleanup on the residents of Silver Bow County. 

With government officials telling us how great things were, most of us believed it.  We were told the Residential Metals Abatement Program was a model, but there were multi-pathway cleanups before RMAP that moved at a much faster pace with public facing documented results. 

Sadly, our government is acting this way in light of the EPA dropping the lead standard to 175 parts per million, which came as a major announcement late last year.

During the first meeting of the Butte-Silver Bow Council of Commissioners of 2025, a letter proposing the official comments to the EPA from our local government appeared on the agenda. The fence-sitting letter was supposedly written by Chief Executive J.P. Gallagher and Director of Reclamation & Environmental Services Eric Hassler, and it clearly showed more concern for the bottom line of British Petroleum than it did for the children of Butte.

Evan Barrett, a founding member of the Butte Watchdogs for Social & Environmental Justice, spoke up and asked the commissioners to hold the letter for a couple of weeks to give the public a chance to comment on it. Thanks to the actions of commissioners Trudy Healy and Jim Fisher, the commission did just that.

Last Wednesday, Barrett, Don “Moose” Petritz and I spoke in front of the Committee of the Whole to simply ask that the official letter from our government forcefully demand that the timeline be drastically sped up.

We don’t want them to hem and haw and write that some citizens have “voiced frustration” over the timeline in the letter. We want them to demand that the cleanup be completed in closer to five years than 25 or 40.

It doesn’t seem too much to ask, and it seems really simple for our leaders to make such an easy statement to show that they are, indeed, more concerned about our children and future children than they are for British Petroleum or impacts to government departments.

We know that British Petroleum, which our government still likes to refers to as “ARCO” even though the international giant bought ARCO for $28.6 billion a quarter of a century ago, has the money to do the job a lot faster than that.

The citizens of Butte have been telling the EPA just that during the comment period that runs until Feb. 14. We simply want our local government to join us in our fight because the official word of the government packs more of a punch with the EPA than a collection of citizen letters.

Commissioners Fisher, Michele Shea, Bill Anderson and Russell O’Leary spoke out and asked questions about the letter at Wednesday’s meeting of the Committee of the Whole.

“I do agree that timeline issue needs to be hit harder from the local government,” Shea, the commissioner for District 2, said. “And the EPA needs to be hit harder on it directly from the public. Twenty-five years is unacceptable. It just is.

“In the meantime, we are harming human health,” Shea said. “It can be done. It’s just a question of willpower and resources.”

Fisher, the Commissioner for District 6, called the timeline “crazy.”

“I think it’s time for Chief Executive Gallagher and Director Hassler and some other people to get firm,” Fisher said, incorporating some frustration over the long Superfund fight in Butte. “We’re tired of this. It’s been 40 years. Let’s start making it happen. Let’s just quit being compliant. Let’s argue. Let’s fight the fight and win this battle.”

Yes, Commissioner Fisher gets it. Scream that over and over ten thousand times. That is all we are saying. That is why I ran for chief executive. We need a leader who will finally — finally — say just that.

Fisher’s comments, along with the comments from me, Barrett and Petritz, appeared to anger Gallagher. He also doesn’t seem to get what we are saying, even though we have said it so many times.

“Nowhere in our letter do we say that we accept 25 years,” Gallagher said in what can best be described as a mini temper tantrum. “Can we be stronger? Yeah, I think we can be stronger.”

The chief executive also said he takes great offense to any suggestions that Butte-Silver Bow is in bed with British Petroleum, which he called “ARCO.”

Well, if you don’t want to be accused of being in bed with the giant oil company, then quit acting like you are in bed with the giant oil company. It really is that simple.

If you don’t accept 25 years, then demand that it be done more quickly. Don’t sit on the fence. Say it with some meaning.

Stand up with us and tell the EPA and BP to get this done in five years. Stand up and say that we will not tolerate the continued poisoning of our children.

Then we will pat you on the back and fight with you, instead of against you. Then we will believe you when you tell us you are “fighting as hard as anybody else.”

In the meantime, we citizens are still on our own. So, we have to speak up and fight for ourselves.

Make sure to email your comments demanding the work be done in five years to EPAButtePPcomments@epa.gov. Tell the EPA to get the lead out now.

It wouldn’t hurt to call and email every commissioner and implore them to be forceful with the EPA, too. It wouldn’t hurt to call and email the chief executive and tell him to do the same.

Yes, it is a battle we should never have to fight. But yet we find ourselves here again. So, let’s fight it with all our might.

Maybe someday our local government will join us.

 — Bill Foley, who won’t quit fighting because he lost an election, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.